It turns out that the villain behind the latest feminist complaint is…a feminist victory of yesteryear.
The new complaint is “the confidence gap.”
Start with this example: In academia, men are 56 percent more likely to “self-cite,” according to a recent study by researchers at the University of Washington. That is, they cite their own prior research at a much higher rate than women do.
And universities measure the influence of and reward their professors based on the number of citations their work receives — so it seems men have once again stacked the decks.
There are legitimate reasons for self-citation — some men doing the citing were pioneers in their math and science fields and they say there is no one else to cite — but something else is going on here, too.
In studying rates of self-citation, Barbara Walter of UC-San Diego interviewed men and women and found that their attitudes about self-promotion differed significantly. The women thought “there was something dirty and underhanded about citing your own work.” The men thought it was “perfectly normal and [asked], ‘Why wouldn’t you want to promote your own work?’”
Anyone who has spent time with men and women will not be particularly surprised by these attitudes. And academia is a profession where these differences are less evident.
Take the world of finance, and Michael Lewis’ famous term for aggressively successful self-promoters there — “Big Swinging Dicks.” It’s not just that these guys are good at their jobs. They make sure everyone else knows it.
The fact that women are reluctant to toot their own horns is a problem for gender equity, say journalists Claire Shipman (ABC News) and Katty Kay (the BBC). An excerpt from their new book, “The Confidence Code,” is the cover story in this month’s Atlantic.
The two detail how women are earning less money and getting fewer promotions because they don’t speak up. They say they’ve interviewed successful women in all walks of life, only to find over and over that these women express doubt that they deserve to be where they are and attribute their successes to luck or to the help of other people.
Even Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told them, “There are still days I wake up feeling like a fraud, not sure I should be where I am.”
Refreshingly, Shipman and Kay are willing to attribute some of the gap to biology: Men are more likely to speak up at work because they’re more biologically programmed to take risks; the part of the brain that controls worrying about past mistakes seems to be larger in women.
What’s odd about this picture, though, is the gals are now outperforming the guys in school — they’re more likely to finish high school, to graduate college, even to earn a graduate degree in many fields. So why are they struggling in the corporate world?
Let’s put aside the fact that women make all sorts of choices with regard to family that prevent them from pursuing a career with the same kind of zeal as men. Kay and Shipman actually say that schools are partly to blame.
“School is where many girls are first rewarded for being good, instead of energetic, rambunctious or even pushy,” they write. But that’s a problem — because it doesn’t teach them to be more competitive or take more risks. Despite teachers’ best efforts, boys still manage to roughhouse and insult each other — and “thus make one another more resilient.”
If you’ve followed the education trends of the past few decades, you should be smacking yourself in the head right about now.
Thirty years ago, notes Chester Finn, there was “widespread anxiety that girls needed help in school.” Finn, a former assistant secretary of education, points out that they got that help “through the federal government with the passage of Title IX and the Women’s Educational Equity Act.”
Since then, Americans have spent God knows how much time and money remaking our schools to be more sensitive, more cooperative, less competitive, more (dare we say it?) feminized to ensure that girls succeed.
We’ve cut back on spelling bees, debate competitions and anything else that might cause the slightest bit of embarrassment. We’ve rewarded effort over performance. We’ve prized neat planners and punished messy math homework. We’ve eliminated dodgeball and cut back recess. We’ve taken to referring to every taunt as bullying.
The environment we’ve created is so challenging for boys that we’ve wound up giving them too much Ritalin to keep them in line — and they are still falling behind.
All of these developments have been bad for boys, says Finn. But it would be, he sighs, a “splendid historical irony if the feminization of K-12 education has led to situation that is bad for girls as well.”